I'm a lot better at carrying out bank robberies than I am at stopping them.
Mayhem missions are some of my favourite content in City of Heroes. Found on redside, these are timed missions that drop the villain(s) into an instanced zone of Paragon City with the goal of robbing the bank and breaking All The Things. There's not a lot of environmental interaction in regular CoH missions, so being able to leave a literal trail of destruction as you fight your way through waves of cops and Longbow is a tremendously visceral supervillain experience.
I usually get away with the loot. Not always, but that's hardly the point. One of the most memorable teaming experiences I ever had in this game was a full team Mayhem that went off the rails in the first minute and never recovered, with the scattered villains fighting running battles against what appeared to be every cop in Paragon City. We didn't even get to the bank, but it was still great fun.
The blueside equivalent of the Mayhem is the Safeguard mission, which uses the same set up but asks the hero to stop the robbery rather than carry it out. There's plenty of villains to fight, but no gratuitous property damage, and I'm not nearly as good at those. Seeing as I didn't do any the last time I was running a hero since I was doing Issue 0 only content, it's been a while, and as usual the lack of any countdown when I entered the instance threw me off, and I wasted too much time getting to the bank.
It didn't end well, and if there's a more embarassing sentence in City of Heroes than "I guess the Skulls were just too much for you" I really don't want to know what it is.
Last time around I intentionally did Issue 0 content. This time I'm... doing Issue 0 content. Not as much of it, but I still ended up in Boomtown again, hunting Clockworks and racking up some more XP debt along the way. I'm over-level for The Hollows and under-level for Faultline, so random(ish) missions from interchangeable NPCs it is. I was offered Bonefire again, but I'd as soon avoid repeating that, or The Vahzilok Plague, seeing as I did them both not that long ago.
This might be the inspiration I need to break with the altitis that runs rampant in this game and push on into the higher levels, even if every time I wax lyrical on the awesomeness of redside I feel like it's going to be a villain, rather than a hero, that first sees level 50 in this new era of City of Heroes. It's good to be good, but it's still better to be bad.
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